WILLOW CREEK — The Willow Creek Free Public Library has a new head librarian, and she has a plan that will make her the most significant custodian of the town’s history since Harold Finch founded the Gazette in 1891.
Doris Kim, 47, was appointed head librarian effective June 1, succeeding Martha Hollis, who served for 22 years. Kim brings experience from the Portland Public Library system, where she worked for 15 years as the coordinator of digital collections.
“I walked into the local history room and saw the bound Gazette volumes on the shelf,” Kim told the Gazette. “One hundred and thirteen years of continuous publication, bound in leather and sitting on a shelf, accessible only to people who can travel to Willow Creek during library hours. My first thought was: we need to digitize this.”
The digitization project — scanning each bound volume page by page, running the images through optical character recognition software, and creating a searchable digital archive — is a massive undertaking that Kim estimates will take years.
“The Gazette is the primary historical record of this town,” Kim said. “The birth announcements. The marriage notices. The obituaries. The Ice-Out results. The town meeting coverage. If we lose these volumes to a fire or a flood, we lose the town’s memory. Digitization is insurance against that loss.”
Clara Winslow wrote an editorial endorsing the project. “If Doris Kim wants to digitize every page of the Gazette dating back to 1891, she will have our full support,” Winslow wrote. “It is a strange feeling to know that one’s life’s work will end up on a computer server. But the stories we have published belong to the town, not to us. Digitizing them ensures they will belong to the town forever.”